Being informed of new technologies and innovation on the web not only makes you a complete geek but also helps you think of problems in different ways. Seeing how new ideas explode onto the scene and watching their influence forces you to approach problem solving from “outside the box” (one of the most overused terms to which few know the origin). Here’s a list of sites I use to keep current with new technologies:

Digg
Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted by users.

Del.icio.us
A social bookmarking tool that lets you see what are the most popular things being bookmarked. Also if you use the networking feature you can tap into your friends and family to share new cool sites.

Bloglines - Really any news reader will do but it’s a great way to ingest loads of content with very little commitment to reading absolutely everything. I equate it to reading the headlines of the paper and only taking a deeper look at those articles which interest you.

Below are a list of blogs which are in my account which I find particularly timely with new ideas:

Boston Business Journal (I live in the Boston area)
Techcrunch
The official Google blog

Okay so it’s been a few days since I started tracking my rank. I made a few changes:

1. I built a site map

I downloaded a plug-in for WordPress. An XML file that creates an index of all my blog posts. It’s intended to make it easier for search engines to crawl your content.

2. I changed my blog naming convention

For my blog postings from something like “id=p23″ to “blog-seo-part-2″ - Simple change in the WordPress options (I can’t figure out why this isn’t the default)

3. My last post about “Sean Landry”

Since those key words are now relevant and were present several times I gained points in the relevance category. It’s important to note you’re posts can be considered SPAM if you load them with keywords.

As of January 20th I’ve moved up one spot! I’m #2 now ahead of the basketball Sean Landry

I’ll keep digging up new methods and post them as I move up or down.

Okay I admit it. I “googled” myself (Sean Landry) the other day. I know I’m not alone here. However, I found something unexpected, my page rank. I was way down at #3! There are two other Sean Landry’s out there in the world ranked ahead of me.

#1 - Sean Landry’s Page on 1UP.com

This is a free Blog site for anyone who registered. Not exactly the most popular one out there but I started to investigate. The other Sean Landry had only one Blog post and way back in 2005? So not exactly showing relevance or activity of any sort.

#2 - University of Manitoba: Bison Men’s Basketball Sean Landry

Landry was a member of Mount Royal Cougars 2006 ACAC Championship team. In his first season with the Cougars, Landry registered a 4.1 points per game average and 3.3 rebounds per game in 17 games. He shot a 41.3% field goal percentage during the championship season.

So other than playing good basketball for the University of Manitoba in 2006 why is he #2?

#3 - Sean Landry

That’s me! Number three? I have Sean Landry in the URL, in the title and all over the site and I post frequently.

I’m on a quest to climb to #1. I’m digging up as many SEO tips and tricks I can find. As I find them I’ll post them here and hopefully I’ll show progress! If you’ve got any good techniques I’d like to hear them.

There’s so much information out there on the web sometimes it’s difficult to find just the right level of intake versus filtering. I’m a bit of a visualization junkie. I’m a trained graphic designer turned web designer turned UX designer. I found by combining several technologies it helps me reach the right information.

1. First I search for visualization on del.icio.us

2. Second, I grab the RSS feed from the executed search:

3. Third I add the feed to my Bloglines account

4. Fourth I scan the results…

There are usually about 100-200 new results per day. I scan the list looking for a high number of users who have tagged sites with the term “visualization”.

Here’s an example I found the other day which is great graphic design and information display. It informs in an entertaining way. There are loads of these gems out there. I’s just a matter of being able to find them.

Vampire Energy

If you’ve been living anywhere but under a rock you’ve been surrounded by the press and the candidates giving you their best pitch for why they want to be president. I’ve decided to evaluate their main campaign web sites and decide who gets the best score for: information architecture, usability and graphic design. All categories are rated 1-10.

All reviews were done the day after the Iowa Caucus

Hillary wins the website review with 24 points.

Interesting observations: First all these sites placed the “contribute” link in the upper right corner. Very good location for findability but also where the mental model of the shopping cart ($$) is, coincidental? Second, each site has way too much information. If they are trying to attract the media for an audience then this is great. But if you’re trying to sway an undecided voter they should be more concise with the information. Last, a few of the sites were guilty of “scroll block” this is usually caused by a horizontal line (or image or text) to span the entire page leading the user to think they have reached the bottom.

Courtesy of 37 signals here is a look at a new Microsoft ad:

Here’s how I think Apple would solve the same problem:

Okay so I don’t think this is exactly how I think Apple would have approached the problem but it does demonstrate the difference of interface philosophies between Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft tries to empower their users by giving them total control over their apps. Apple tries to find the best default and give a few options but keeps the “configure everything” out of the interface.

So what do you think? Give the user more control but a more complex interface, or define a good default and keep the interface simple?

Amazon is in the early stages of revealing their new design. According to their website:

“We traveled around the world, inviting customers like you to come and try out the new features and design. We listened to their feedback and made changes based on their opinions. Then we asked more customers for their advice, and we made more changes from their feedback. The design you see today reflects the input of many real-life customers of our U.S. and international websites.”

Original Web Design

Amazon’s traditional tabbed navigation

It’s nice to hear they listened to their customers, they sure don’t have a shortage of those.

It’s interesting to note, Amazon was the site that made “tabbed navigation” so popular. With their new design they’ve changed the navigation scheme to primarily left navigation.

Perhaps they read Jacob Nielsen’s latest post